Lord Hillsborough greeted them with the same lavish civility he had displayed in Dublin Castle. In fact, like a chameleon he seemed to have absorbed the coloration of the Irish atmosphere, and Franklin could only blink in astonishment as he heard his Lordship “censuring the English government for its narrowness with regard to Ireland, in restraining its commerce, manufactures &c.” Franklin, of course, immediately “apply’d his observations to America” and to his further astonishment, Lord Hillsborough agreed that it was “wrong to restrain our manufactures” and avowed that “the subjects in every part of the King’s dominions had a natural right to make the best use they could of the production of their country.” This was practically a quotation from Franklin’s newspaper propaganda. His Lordship went on to declare that he always avoided laying before Parliament reports of colonial manufacturers, unless they were especially called for. He took the credit for a recent bounty he dared by Parliament to encourage silk manufacturing in America and asked Franklin to advise him on how to persuade Parliament to vote a similar bounty for the production of wine. And had Franklin any thoughts on Newfoundland, which had now become settled to the point where it needed a “proper form of government?”
This startling request for Franklin’s advice did not end his Lordship’s kind attentions. He insisted on Franklin’s taking a tour of the neighborhood, and summoned his eldest son, Lord Kilwarling, to escort their guest on a forty-mile ramble. It was a chilly day, and his Lordship doffed his greatcoat and put it over Franklin’s shoulders with his own hands as the carriage pulled away.
Writing to his son, several weeks later, Franklin was still puzzling over this reversal of form on Hillsborough’s part. “Does not all this seem extraordinary to you? I knew not what to make of it, unless that he foresaw a storm on acct of his conduct to America, and was willing to lessen beforehand the acrimony with which the people & friends of that country might possibly pursue him.” To Thomas Cushing, in a letter written about the same time, Franklin was even more dubious about Hillsborough’s conduct. He pointed out that his Lordship had not repealed any of the offensive instructions, such as forcing the Boston Assembly to sit at Cambridge. He therefore was inclined to think that his Lordship “meant only, by patting and stroaking the horse, to make him more patient, while the reins are drawn tighter, and the spurs set deeper into his sides.” Back in London, after renewing his friendship with Lord Karnes, Alexander Dick and other old acquaintances in Scotland, Franklin hastened to pay his respects to Lord Hillsborough and thank him for his hospitality in Ireland. Before Franklin could get out of his coach, the porter curtly told him that his Lordship was not at home. He left his card and returned a second time, to receive the same answer. This time Franklin knew it was a blatant lie, because one of his good friends was with Hillsborough, by appointment. The following week he made another visit and got the same blunt answer. Persevering, he came back a week later on a levee day, a day on which his Lordship saw visitors by the dozen. There were numerous carriages parked around the square, and Franklin’s coachman did not bother to ask whether his Lordship was at home. He was opening the coach door when Hillsborough’s porter came bawling out at him. How dare he open his door before he had inquired whether my Lord was at home! Then he turned to Franklin and said in his most insolent tone, “My Lord is not at home.”
That was Franklin’s last visit. Thereafter, as he told his son William, he and Hillsborough “only abused one another at a distance.”
But Franklin declined to let Lord Hillsborough ruin the good spirits he had regained as a result of his three months’ jog through Ireland and Scotland. A decided plus to his happiness was a meeting with his son-in-law, Richard Bache, who had returned to England to meet his father-in-law and visit his aging mother. Bache had brought along with him 1000 pounds which he hoped Franklin would be willing to distribute in the right places to buy him a government job. Franklin declined flatly. Instead, he advised Bache to take the money and buy goods to sell in Philadelphia on a cash and carry basis. If he would thus “sit down to business in Philadelphia,” Franklin thought he might “by quick returns, get forward in the world.” Rather pointedly, Franklin wrote to his son, “I wish to see all I am connected with in an independent situation, supported by their own industry.”
Bache took his father-in-law’s advice, and Franklin, pleased with his son-in-law on this and all other points, added 200 pounds of his own money to his capital.
About the same time, Franklin got a cheerful letter from his “adopted daughter,” Polly Stevenson, who had married a young doctor named Hewson and given birth to her first child. She had made Franklin his godfather. Polly told him that the young man resembled his godfather in many interesting ways. “He is generally serious, no great talker, but sometimes laughs very hearty; he is fond of being in his birthday suit, and has not the least apprehension of catching cold in it; he is never troubled with the aerophobia, but always seems delighted with fresh air.”
Franklin jovially replied: “His being like me in so many particulars pleases me prodigiously; and I am persuaded there is another, which you have omitted, tho’ it must have occurr’d to you while you were putting them down.”
He proceeded to give Polly some impromptu advice on raising the young man. “Pray let him have everything he likes; I think it of great consequence while the features of the countenance are forming; it gives them a pleasant air, and, that being once become natural and fix’d by habit, the face is ever after the handsomer for it, and on that much of a person’s good fortune and success in life may depend. Had I been cross’d as much in my infant likings and inclinations as you know I have been of late years [a reference to the kisses Franklin was always trying to steal from Polly and her young friends] I should have been, I was going to say, not near so handsome; but as the vanity of that expression would offend other folks’ vanity, I change it, out of regard to them, and say a great deal more homely.”
In the same letter Polly teasingly warned him that her mother was seeing another man in his absence. Franklin declared he was hardly surprised. “I have been us’d to rivals, and scarce ever had a friend or a mistress in my whole life, that other people did not like as well as myself.” His only problem, he said, was trying to figure out who the enterprising stranger was. At first he suspected a certain duke, having read in the paper that that gentleman was visiting of late “an old lady not many miles from Craven Street.” But then he read that Prince Charles had vanished from Rome on a mysterious journey, and decided it was he who had taken the opportunity to “solace himself.”
This renewed energy and joie de vivre inspired Franklin to do more than simply abuse Lord Hillsborough at a distance. He made it well known at dinner tables around London that he was preparing an exhaustive critique of Hillsborough’s administration, which would demolish that gentleman once and for all. Simultaneously, through the other influential members of the Grand Ohio Company, he put more and more pressure on Hillsborough to issue a report on the petition for the new colony.
Hillsborough had used up every excuse for delay. The Virginians had been bought out and merged their interest with the Grand Ohio people, numerous petitions had poured in from the frontier (stimulated by Samuel Wharton and his friends) warning of the need for formal government and of preventing a new Indian war. Franklin had spent almost two decades weaving a web of intimate political contacts, and he now used all of his resources on the shaky Irish Lord. William Strahan wrote a letter to his (and Franklin’s) friend, the philosopher David Hume, asking for his help. Hume in turn wrote to Lord Hertford, the King’s chamberlain, who in turn spoke to the King, and soon Hillsborough was shaken to the soles of his feet by a direct inquiry from George III himself about the strange delays which seemed to beset plans for the new western colony.
The cornered Hillsborough at last issued a report from the Board of Trade condemning the proposition. Lord Gower, the president of the Privy Council, who also was a partner in the Grand Ohio Company, arranged for a
public hearing on the petition. Samuel Wharton was chosen to make the verbal presentation, but it is almost a certainty that most of his devastating arguments, entitled “Observations on, and Answers to the Foregoing Report,” were composed by Benjamin Franklin. Wharton was no mean talker, and he put on a magnificent performance before the Privy Council’s Committee for Plantation Affairs. Less than a month later, the Committee recommended to the Privy Council that the Board of Trade’s report be set aside and a new colony be created as soon as possible.
Seldom had an English politician been more mortified than Lord Hillsborough. The Committee’s decision was a cruel blow to his prestige. He had only one alternative: resignation.
Exultantly, Franklin wrote to William, “At length we have got rid of Lord Hillsborough . . . to the great satisfaction of all the friends of America. You will hear it said among you, I suppose, that the interest of the Ohio planters has ousted him; but the truth is, what I wrote you long since, that all his brother ministers disliked him extremely, and wished for a fair occasion of tripping up his heels; so, seeing that he made a point of defeating our scheme, they made another of supporting it on purpose to mortify him, which they knew his pride could not bear. I do not mean that they would have done this if they had thought our proposal had in itself, or his opposition well founded; but I believe if he had been on good terms with them they would not have differed with him for so small a matter. The King, too, was tired of him and of his administration, which had weakened the affection and the respect of the colonies for the royal government, of which (I may say it to you) I used proper means from time to time that His Majesty would have due information and convincing proofs….
“The King’s dislike made the others more firmly united in the resolution of disgracing Hillsborough, by setting at nought his famous report.”
Did this mean that the Grand Ohio Company was at last about to triumph? Franklin was too experienced a politician to make so rash a prediction. “Now that the business is done, perhaps our affair may be less regarded in the Cabinet, and suffered to linger, and possibly may yet miscarry. Therefore, let us beware of every word and action that may betray a confidence in its success lest we render ourselves ridiculous in case of disappointment. We are now pushing for a completion of the business; but the time is unfavorable, everybody gone or going into the country, which gives room for accidents….”
Not only had he gotten rid of Lord Hillsborough; Franklin also played no small part in choosing his successor. As he told the story to William, “A friend at Court,” possibly the American artist, Benjamin West, who had just been made historical painter to the King, told Franklin, “We Americans were represented by Hillsborough as an unquiet people, not easily satisfied with any ministry; that, however, it was thought too much occasion had been given us to dislike the present.” The friend then asked Franklin, if Hillsborough were removed, who would be more acceptable. “There is Lord Dartmouth,” Franklin replied. “We liked him very well when he was at the head of the Board [of Trade] formerly, and probably should like him again.”
To Franklin’s scarcely concealed delight, Henry Legge, first Earl of Dartmouth, became Secretary of State for the American Colonies and President of the Board of Trade, a few weeks after Hillsborough resigned. In personality he was the total opposite of Hillsborough. Dartmouth was a sensitive, deeply religious man with a staunchly pro-American attitude and record. Thanks to his generosity, the college of Dartmouth had been founded in New Hampshire, and his Lordship had patented 100,000 acres of land in east Florida for his sons, and some 40,000 acres in the Ohio country for himself. Everything about him seemed to presage a benevolent administration and a favorable attitude toward the creation of the new colony.
The apparent totality of his victory dazzled Franklin into a surge of unparalleled optimism. “As to my situation here,” be told Governor Franklin, “nothing can be more agreeable. . . A general respect paid me by the learned, a number of friends and acquaintance among them with whom I have a pleasing intercourse; a character of so much weight that it has protected me when some in power would have done me injury, and continued me in an office they would have deprived me of; my company so much desired that I seldom dine at home in winter, and could spend the whole summer in the country-houses of inviting friends if I chose it. Learned and ingenious foreigners who come to England almost all make a point of visiting me; for my reputation is still higher abroad than here. Several of the foreign ambassadors have assiduously cultivated my acquaintance, treating me as one of their corps, partly I believe from the desire they have, from time to time, of hearing something of American affairs, an object become of importance in foreign courts, who begin to hope Britain’s alarming power will be diminished by the defection of her colonies; and partly that they may have an opportunity of introducing me to the gentlemen of their country who desire it. The King, too, has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard….”
Only one thing troubled him for the moment, a violent longing for home that sometimes seized him, and which he managed to subdue only by “promising myself a return next spring or next fall and so forth.” Now, however, the encouraging change in the government “being thrown into the balance” persuaded him to “stay another winter.”
The remark about balance refers to Franklin’s ingenious way of making decisions. About this same time, Joseph Priestley, a young English scientist whom Franklin had befriended and helped to write his History and Present State of Electricity, asked his advice on a job offer. Lord Shelburne wanted him to become his librarian, and Priestley, who was teaching school, could not decide whether the job would give him more or less time for his writing and scientific activity. Franklin replied that for want of sufficient information he couldn’t really tell him what to decide, but he could tell him how. “When these difficult cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes one set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence . . . the uncertainty that perplexes us.
“To get over this, my way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one pro and over the other con, Then during three or four days of consideration I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavour to estimate their respective weights; and where I find two (one on each side) that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three . . . and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies; and if after a day or two of farther consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly…. I have found great advantage from this moral or prudential algebra.”
Priestley was one of a group of liberal young scientists whom Franklin gathered around him during the 1770s in London. They were all as interested in politics as they were in science, a by no means unusual phenomenon in those days, and they were also effective writers and speakers. Not surprisingly, Franklin swiftly enlisted them on America’s side of the battle for public opinion.
Another young man who caught Franklin’s eye was Benjamin Vaughan, born in the West Indies, American in blood and sympathies, thanks to his Boston-born mother. Vaughan was something of a walking encyclopedia, interested in everything from science to agriculture. A third member of the circle, young in spirit although some years older, was Richard Price, an expert on economics, who longed to reform England’s mercantile system, with its antiquated state controls. But the man who seems to have engendered the most enthusiasm in Franklin was suave, engaging Edward Bancroft. Connecticut born, he had emigrated to England, married an English wife, and made a modest fortune running a plantation in Surinam. There he had become a pioneer in the art and science of vegetable dyes, and a student, among other thing
s, of tropical poisons. Bancroft wrote some very effective pro-American propaganda under Franklin’s tutelage, and impressed the older man both with his ardor for his country’s cause and with his shrewd penetrating mind.
In a very loose, unstructured way, these and other men of similar political inclinations revolved around Franklin’s old friend from the colonial office, Lord Shelburne. Franklin himself continued to maintain a close friendship with this immensely wealthy nobleman. Shelburne was a people collector, who enjoyed entertaining diverse personalities at his handsome country house, Bowood, outside of London. During one Franklin visit the other guests were Colonel Isaac Barré, the defender of American rights in Parliament; David Garrick, the noted actor; and Abbe Andre Morellet, a free-thinking French priest, who had spent some time in the Bastille for defending the liberal French philosopher against powerful conservatives. The abbe was deeply interested in politics and government, as well as science, and he found Franklin fascinating. In bad French and broken English they agreed on the need to promote freedom of commerce in the world, discussed population trends and exchanged favorite drinking songs.
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